Accidental Encounters

by George Friesen

  Most of the beggars were regulars, but within the last month, they had been joined by a man named Hussein, who claimed that he was a refugee from Aleppo, the commercial center of Syria. He had lost everything, he said—his home, his family, his business—in a bombing attack by the Syrian air force directed against the insurgents who had gained control of the city. He had fled to Turkey with only the clothes on his back. None of the beggars doubted his story; it was only too familiar. However, some of the regulars who hailed from Aleppo wondered about his accent. He spoke Arabic fluently, but with inflections that were Turkish, not genuinely Aleppine. He explained that he had grown up in a small village near the Turkish border but had moved to Aleppo as a young man.

  Hussein sat slightly apart from the other beggars, as was his custom, carefully studying the faces of pedestrians who walked by. His hair was tousled, his heavy beard flecked with gray, his face sunburned and creased, but his eyes were ever watchful, not dulled by misfortune. Whenever a policeman approached to urge the beggars to make way for pedestrians, he complied quickly, never engaging in verbal confrontation with him, as some of the other beggars did.

  Among the faithful attending prayers this Friday was Omer Tilki, accompanied by Yavuz and a second bodyguard. In recent months, he had become a regular attendee at prayers on Friday because he recognized the benefits of burnishing his image as a pious man with the media and the government. Frequently he would stop to press a coin into the outstretched hands of the beggars assembled outside the Blue Mosque, although he was not a particularly generous donor.

  Tilki had good reason to feel pleased with himself. Business was going well. The company’s real estate investments were booming, and the profit margins on merchandise trading were strong. Moreover, illicit operations—what the company referred to as “special operations”—had recovered nicely from the depredations of the police in Greece, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The New York office was not essential to the company’s worldwide operations, and Recep Murat, freed from his duties there, had proved to be a fine replacement for Demir Ozmen. As long as his father remained in the good graces of the prime minister, they had nothing to fear from any official investigation.

  Within minutes, he expected to announce, in front of the Blue Mosque, the creation of a fund by the Ottoman Trading Company to help Syrian refugees. It was a brilliant publicity coup that would erase any memory of the unfortunate events of the last year. He noticed that members of the media were already gathering outside the entrance to the Blue Mosque.

  Omer Tilki heard the shrill cry of an old woman begging for alms. He paused and walked over to her, fumbling for a coin in his pocket. His bodyguards remained behind, amused smiles on their cynical, hardened faces. As he pressed a coin into her frail, wizened hand, she whispered blessings on him. A toothless smile lit up her sad wrinkled face. Looking into that face, Tilki felt a chill. Her eyes were opaque—the eyes of a blind woman. He turned to get away. She reminded him of death.

  He was unaware of a bearded beggar who approached swiftly from behind, his hand outstretched. His palm was not open to receive alms but held a gun that he had pulled from within his tattered jacket. Three shots rang out, and the heir to the Ottoman Trading Company lay dead in the plaza, his sightless eyes staring up at the startled pigeons circling overhead. It happened so quickly that his bodyguards, looking in the opposite direction, had no time to react.

  Pedestrians screamed as the bearded man lunged through the crowd and disappeared down a side street, with Yavuz in pursuit. Policemen came running. Distant shots could be heard, then silence.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Dave and Elizabeth—sitting on the terrace of the Sultanahmet Palace Hotel restaurant—heard what sounded like the backfiring of a car, followed by the sirens of approaching ambulances and police cars. These sounds did not seem unusual for a large, teeming city like Istanbul. They continued with their meal, listening intently to a discourse by Professor Oguz on the building of the Blue Mosque by Sultan Ahmed I in the early seventeenth century on the site of the palace of the former Byzantine emperors.

  When the waiter brought small cups of steaming black coffee, the conversation turned back to Dave’s experience as a hostage of a Mexican drug cartel.

  “That must have been a terrifying experience—locked up in that small motel room with your brother and Demir Ozmen, thinking that you could be killed at any moment,” said Elizabeth sympathetically. “Do you still have nightmares about what happened?”

  Dave shook his head. “No, not anymore. But I think about my experience from time to time. I have some bitter memories.”

  “About …?”

  “An old friendship betrayed. I would rather not talk about it.”

  The weekend before his departure for Istanbul, he had received a letter from John Shafer. He had opened it reluctantly. It was an apologetic invitation from Shafer and his wife, Ellen, to Dave and Melanie, asking them to come for dinner at their home in Manhattan. This was nearly nine months after they had visited the Bigelow home. Was it a peace overture, an olive branch extended in an effort to dispel the mistrust that had grown up between them? Or was it another attempt to glean information about his brother, Bob, with whom he might have lost contact? Dave had felt the anger stirring within him over an old friendship renewed and then abused.

  After several days, he was still uncertain about how he should respond. If he accepted, would he endanger a possible reconciliation with his younger brother? In all fairness, Bob was partly to blame for the events that had sucked Dave and him into the maelstrom of a murky war against drugs. Shafer’s behavior had been devious, but in the end, he had not pressed criminal charges against Bob, for which Dave was grateful. That was the other side of the argument. Maybe he should put old grudges aside and accept the invitation. He would discuss it with Melanie when he returned home.

  “Okay. Did you derive anything positive from that experience?” Elizabeth persisted. “Like bonding with your brother? The two of you should have war stories to swap about your captivity for many years.” She laughed as she said it.

  His face relaxed into a grin. “Funny that you should say that. I made a promise to my father to take care of my brother and—”

  “And did you?”

  “I think so, putting both my wealth and life at risk. But old attitudes die hard. My brother and I never bonded before our trauma, and our experience as prisoners of a Mexican drug gang did not change that. We saw each other only once after our rescue before he disappeared for seven months.”

  “No telephone calls, no emails. Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing until yesterday, when I received an email from him inviting Melanie and me to his wedding in Vancouver. He also advised me to stay out of trouble because it might come looking for me.” Dave laughed. “I wonder what he meant by that?”

  “No idea, but this could be a turning point!” She chuckled, patting him on the arm.

  They were interrupted by their excited waiter, who gestured in the direction of the Blue Mosque. “Come quickly! An important Turkish businessman has been shot!”

  Everyone rushed to the side of the terrace to get a better view of the growing commotion in front of the Blue Mosque. A rising crescendo of police and ambulance sirens almost drowned out Professor Oguz’s question: “Who was the victim?”

  “Omer Tilki, the president of the Ottoman Trading Company. A Syrian refugee did it.” The waiter’s voice trembled with nationalist indignation. “These refugees show no gratitude for the hospitality that Turkey has extended to them. Think of it. There are millions of them in our country! We should expel them.”

  “Omer Tilki! Was anyone else hurt?” asked Professor Oguz anxiously, ignoring the waiter’s xenophobic comment about Syrian refugees.

  “There was a second casualty—Tilki’s bodyguard. He was running after the killer. But then, Allah be praised, the police have trap
ped the assassin in a merchant’s shop in the Grand Bazaar. Only a devil could escape. Soon he will be dead.”

  Dave felt like an accomplice in Tilki’s death. He knew the identity of the killer, even the location of the shop where the killer had taken refuge before slipping through the door hidden behind carpets and down the stairs into the Basilica Cistern. But he would never share that information with the police. By the time the police discovered the door, it would be too late. Husayin Yilmaz would have escaped.

  How had Yilmaz known where Tilki would be and at what time so that he could plan the assassination? He thought about Ahmet and knew with certainty that he was not the only accomplice in the murder. The information—which had been given to him casually by Elizabeth Waters and that he had passed on to Ahmet with equal nonchalance on Wednesday night—had proven deadly.

  The guilty thought occurred to him that being a carrier of information with deadly consequences was becoming a habit. Divulging to Hayat that her cousin had been arrested by the Greek Coast Guard had triggered a chain of events resulting in her death. Now Omer Tilki had died as well because of what he had told Ahmet.

  Dave brushed away his moral qualms. Surely, he could not be held responsible for what others did with information he gave them with the best of intentions.

  He looked at Professor Oguz. “Is this the Turkish justice for which you hoped for earlier?” he asked. It was a provocative question.

  Oguz shook his head and then responded gravely, “This is not Turkish justice! This lawlessness is rather a symptom of how the Syrian civil war is infecting the body politic of my country, like a virus. Unless that war ends soon, I fear for Turkey’s future.”

  “But are you not overlooking a second virus—the danger of political corruption in a government that is becoming more authoritarian and thwarting justice?” asked Dave, impatient with Oguz’s evasion of what, to him, was obvious.

  He immediately regretted asking the question. It was awkward, even presumptuous. What could an American visiting Turkey for only the third time tell the Turks about how to run their own country, especially when there was so much corruption at home?

  Oguz avoided his gaze and did not respond. That puzzled Dave, who had talked enough with Oguz to know that he supported the goals of freedom and justice, which Hayat Yilmaz had pursued. He had called her the symbol of what he hoped Turkey would become.

  When the professor finally looked up, his eyes flicked sideways in the direction of the waiter. Then Dave understood. Caution advised Oguz against speaking openly in front of the waiter, who represented what Turkey was becoming. The waiter might be a government sympathizer who could inform on him. He taught at a publicly funded university, where reprisals were possible. His job could be at risk. Even worse, he could be accused of treason and imprisoned. Oguz gestured toward the Blue Mosque, where attendants were lifting Omer Tilki’s body into an ambulance.

  And what was Tilki? Dave wondered. An enabler who had abetted the political ambitions of Turkey’s authoritarian leader—without regard to the freedoms being crushed—in order to serve his own corrupt interests?

  By instinct and by training, Dave recoiled from the manner in which Tilki had died. Even a drug kingpin and multiple murderer deserved a fair trial by jury. Yilmaz had usurped due process, acting as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. Yet the likelihood of a fair verdict was slim in a country where an independent judiciary no longer existed and where Tilki could avail himself of the best defense counsel and powerful political connections. Dave was willing to concede that rough justice had been the best of the possible alternatives.

  Then he thought about his own precarious situation. His orderly life as a New York lawyer had been turned upside down in a matter of months. What if an informer had observed him and Ahmet entering the shop Wednesday evening when he had first met the killer? Yilmaz would not have been seen by anyone outside the shop. Still, the Istanbul police might look for a connection, and he would be in trouble if they thought he was withholding information. He had met the killer, inadvertently provided him with the information that he needed to plot his revenge, and even knew how he planned to escape. Spending time in a Turkish prison did not appeal to him.

  Hours later, Dave was on the first available flight back to New York.